Saturday, August 20, 2016

Mad Men and the Donut Hole

Clive James, in his continuing self-proclaimed farewell tour to life and art, says farewell to Mad Men. And as it happened, so, just this week, did we. I'll let Clive speak for himself (some kind of confusing paywall but persist) For me: yeh, well, the last few episodes seemed to run out of steam, as almost always happens with this sort of thing. They repeated themselves; they picked up possible plot lines you knew they were going to have to abandon. And then, the finale, everybody (not just Clive James) has to have a finale.

I won't get tedious with a lot of stuff that others have probably said before and better, but here is a glaring difficulty that I don't think has received much attention so far. Don Draper, the center of the action. Pleasant, affable, cold eyed dissembler, thief of the life of another, one who inflicts casual collateral damage on almost any within range.

But we forgive him because he's Michelangelo, he's Balzac, Svengali, he's a cool quiet 'Enry 'Iggins, the one who can be depended upon to make lemonade out of moldy old peach pits.

The whole show hangs on this premise and you have to believe if you want it to make any sense at all and sure, I pretty much signed on. But I kept recalling that nothing--nothing--in the script actually showed me that Don was a genius, advertising or otherwise. I just had to count on the fact that everyone kept telling me so--that, and his capacity for casual mayhem. In the end, he's to the Svengali, he's the hole in the donut. But rest assured Give him 20 minutes of silence around a boardroom table while everyone else is tearing their hair out, he'll come up with a way to market donut holes, too. Now go read Clive, he never lets us down.

2 comments:

"But I kept recalling that nothing--nothing--in the script actually showed me that Don was a genius, advertising or otherwise. "

Damn right. And this was in the era of great, highly memorable, breakthrough advertising. "Think Small" for Volkswagen. "We're only Number 2" for Avis. "At sixty miles an hour in your new Rolls Royce, the loudest noise comes from the ticking of the electric clock," obviously for Rolls Royce. A chimpanzee in a TV spot copying his banana on an office machine for Xerox. And on and on.

Not only do we not see any great advertising in Madmen. We never saw anybody having real fun. The work was fun. The play was fun. Yes there was oodles of marital infidelity. But it was done with joyful, sometimes idiotically joyful abandon, and gossiped about after work with much laughter. Guys got themselves into incredible difficulties over one-night stands. One married guy woke up in the wrong bed on Christmas morning. Another got stuck paying the rent on an assignation flat that he originally leased with four other guys, but then our guy's girlfriend moved in, refused to move out, refused to pay the rent, and drove off the three other rent payers, leaving one married lothario with an annual nut he couldn't justify and no way of breaking the lease. And on and on.

There were even tragic-comedies. Four guys from an agency called Benton & Bowles phoned their wives to say they'd be working late, then went with their dates to the roof of some secretary's apartment for a party. Several of them were sitting in a hammock swinging and canoodling at the same time when the chimney collapsed, killing one of them. It made the newspapers. Try to talk your way out of that one.

What Madmen got right was that there was a lot of drinking, smoking and cheating, (although not of the joyless kind the show portrayed) and that if you worked with a title higher than Peon Third Class, you had a secretary sitting outside your door. The rest is all the feeble imagining of some guy who wasn't even born when it all happened and evidently can't understanding that people mixed together work and play as never before and never since.

Yours crankily,The New York CrankVP, Copy Group HeadVP Associate Creative DirectorSr. VP Associate Creative DirectorSr. VP Co-Creative Directorand so on and so forth....

"But I kept recalling that nothing--nothing--in the script actually showed me that Don was a genius, advertising or otherwise. "

Damn right. And this was in the era of great, highly memorable, breakthrough advertising. "Think Small" for Volkswagen. "We're only Number 2" for Avis. "At sixty miles an hour in your new Rolls Royce, the loudest noise comes from the ticking of the electric clock," obviously for Rolls Royce. A chimpanzee in a TV spot copying his banana on an office machine for Xerox. And on and on.

Not only do we not see any great advertising in Madmen. We never saw anybody having real fun. The work was fun. The play was fun. Yes there was oodles of marital infidelity. But it was done with joyful, sometimes idiotically joyful abandon, and gossiped about after work with much laughter. Guys got themselves into incredible difficulties over one-night stands. One married guy woke up in the wrong bed on Christmas morning. Another got stuck paying the rent on an assignation flat that he originally leased with four other guys, but then our guy's girlfriend moved in, refused to move out, refused to pay the rent, and drove off the three other rent payers, leaving one married lothario with an annual nut he couldn't justify and no way of breaking the lease. And on and on.

There were even tragic-comedies. Four guys from an agency called Benton & Bowles phoned their wives to say they'd be working late, then went with their dates to the roof of some secretary's apartment for a party. Several of them were sitting in a hammock swinging and canoodling at the same time when the chimney collapsed, killing one of them. It made the newspapers. Try to talk your way out of that one.

What Madmen got right was that there was a lot of drinking, smoking and cheating, (although not of the joyless kind the show portrayed) and that if you worked with a title higher than Peon Third Class, you had a secretary sitting outside your door. The rest is all the feeble imagining of some guy who wasn't even born when it all happened and evidently can't understand that people mixed together work and play as never before and never since.

Yours crankily,The New York CrankVP, Copy Group HeadVP Associate Creative DirectorSr. VP Associate Creative DirectorSr. VP Co-Creative Directorand so on and so forth....